Designing cost-effective network-on-chip by dual-channel access mechanism

A dual-channel access mechanism to overcome the drawback of traditional single-channel access mechanism for network-on-chip (NoC) is proposed. In traditional single-channel access mechanism, every Internet protocol (IP) has only one channel to access the on-chip network. When the network is relatively idle, the injection rate is too small to make good use of the network resource. When the network is relatively busy, the ejection rate is so small that the packets in the network cannot leave immediately, and thus the probability of congestion is increased. In the dual-channel access mechanism, the injection rate of IP and the ejection rate of the network are increased by using two optional channels in network interface (NI) and local port of routers. Therefore, the communication performance is improved. Experimental results show that compared with traditional single-channel access mechanism, the proposed scheme greatly increases the throughput and cuts down the average latency with reasonable area increase.